Mending an Hand-Knit

One of the easiest and most rewarding things to mend is that lovely old hand-knit.  Sometimes the garment has sentimental value and mending a hand-knit can give you a lovely feeling of connection with the original knitter.   They are also quite easy to mend ...

Recently I mended this hand-knit jumper / sweater ... it really has had a life!  All those safety pins mark holes or areas of weakened yarn, about to become a hole.  There was a huge laddered area on one sleeve and some of the seams had gone.  (I must also apologise for the photos showing this jumper as all sorts of shades of green - different light at different times of the day and my having to use a phone camera - my digital one died!)

Re-sewing up seams is easy enough - use mattress stitch.  Sometimes the trickiest part of mending an old hand-knit is finding new yarn to match the old.  Going for a thinner yarn is always a good idea - I used a lace weight variegated yarn (Schoppel-Wolle) selecting the parts where the green was almost the same shade.

Sewing up the under-arms again - and in this photo you can see some old mends done by someone else a long time ago.

 I left one of those old mends & strengthened it but re-did the other - and this photo shows the front of the jumper with all mends and strengthening done.  This is pre-washing - blocking and some of those specks of paint didn't come out with a simple wash.

Such an old, much worn and loved knit will never look brand new again - but it can be given many more years of usefulness.


Here is how to mend an area that has gone to ladders.

First - catch all the stitches at the top and bottom to stop them laddering further.  Putting them onto safety pins works well -

Now re-knit up those ladders - and this is the same technique you use if you've dropped a stitch while hand-knitting.

Take one of those stitches from the bottom of the area onto a crochet hook and thinking of those loose strands as rungs on a ladder, work them up, one rung at a time, taking care to get the 'rungs' in the correct order. 

In case you are wondering - that isn't even an official crochet hook.  Everyone under the age of 12 seems to be making "Loom Bands" these days and most bags of those little elastic bands come with a hook ...

When re-knitting up a ladder you are working a sort of chain stitch - hook goes through the loop of the stitch, hold in front of the lowest 'rung', catch rung and pull it through loop - and it becomes your new loop, hold it in front of the next rung ... ...  repeat till you get to the top.  Where you will need a sewing needle and matching yarn to stitch together the stitch / loop from your ladder and the corresponding stitch at the top of the area being mended.

Most of these laddered areas start from a hole and you will probably find some broken yarn somewhere in the middle ... sewing needle & yarn will be needed there.
This photo shows the mend pre-washing







And now, after a wash ... a few more washes and I think the mend might be practically invisible.

Get Mending! A Workshop

This Saturday - 17th March - from 1pm - I'm going to be facilitating the first of 3 workshops at the Green Living Centre (aka The Watershed) 218 King St, Newtown.

This first workshop will be all about Mending clothes ... the virtuous frugality of Make Do & Mend will also help save our environment.  Think of the amount of water* and energy it takes to make a T-shirt.

 

Learn how to get a few more years from a favourite jumper ...

Underarm disaster!

Manage very nearly almost completely invisible mends in knit fabrics and woven.

Can you see the mend?

Hide those mends that are visible - and turn an "Opps!" into a "Design Feature".

Underneath those pretty flowers lurk glue stains

Have fun with Patches.

Hem? What hem?

Learn how to fix a hem so it doesn't show



and how to sew on those buttons so they don't fall off again!

We'll even learn what you are meant to do with one of these :-)





For more information about this and the following workshops:
Marrickville Council website
City of Sydney website 
The Watershed on facebook

phone: 9519 6366

Shop front 218 King Street Newtown - hours: 10am-4pm Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-7pm Thursdays.

*  Cotton T-Shirt ... takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.  (source: TreeHugger.com)

Make Do & Mend

Whether it is for reasons of frugality, or thumbing your nose at consumerism, or because you can't bear to throw out a favourite garment - it feels good to Mend, Repair, Recycle...

Oh Dear!  I had managed to get super-glue on a favourite singlet top - it is a flattering pistachio green, a nice rayon knit and it has a matching cardigan so I did not want to toss it!
But nasty dark (and stiff) spots of glue down the front - one big splodge and a trail of small ones. 

Now, I also like to mend things in a way that adds to them - Up-cycle rather than Re-cycle - and my favourite method of hiding small stains or mended holes is by embroidering something pretty over the top.  I often work lazy-daisy flowers (there are quite a few YouTube clips if you want to know how to do these) but I felt that this top deserved something a bit more special so I worked some Bullion Stitch roses, with buds etc.

 The fun part comes first - selecting which threads  to use. 
2 greens ... not too blue or 'sweet'
and for the flowers I went with shades of apricot instead of the more obvious pinky rose colours.

I like the 'Susan O'Connor' bullion stitch rose - basically you start with the darkest shade & work a bullion loop (in the middle of that big stain).  And because I'm not very good at this - I needed 2 loopy stitches!

 

 

 

Then with the next shade work bullion stitches spiralling around that centre...

Sorry for the blurry photo

Then progress to a lighter colour and work more bullions around ...  And even if you are not very skillful the result is still quite pretty.  Especially if your photos are blurry!!

The splash pattern of small stains seemed obvious as a 'rose bud' on a curving stem.  Here is the bud - 3 bullion grubs with a dark one in the middle.

 Rose and bud on finished stem - used stem stitch for the stem (naturally!) and bullion grubs beside the bud & for the leaves; small in the dark green with long grubs above in the light olive colour.

SO - those stains are quite disguised now but those flowers are awkwardly placed and the rose is floating in a very isolated way.  So I put the singlet on Daphne (my mannequin) and planned with pins how to make the emboridery look like a Deliberate Design Decision but with a minimum of additional work!     

Oops - obviously needs to be ironed, but one of those creases inspired the placement of another bud-on-stem.

And here is the finished singlet top - worked another full Susan O'Connor rose & a bud to keep that first rose company, and a 2nd bud-on-stem curving in the other direction.